Everybody knows that newspapers as we know them are a dying medium. Everybody can see that where once there may have been several or even dozens of daily and weekly news publications in cities like New York and Chicago or morning and afternoon editions in communities throughout the country, today the broadsheets are dropping like flies. Just as everyone knew that television would kill radio and everyone knows that the internet will put an end to television, newspapers will soon disappear from the face of the earth.
Truth be told, newspapers are in trouble. Like the Big Three (or the Detroit Three if you prefer and by the way, what are we going to call them now that Fiat owns a piece of Chrysler?), the papers didn’t see the shift in technology, trends and lifestyles that were omens for the changes that would diminish their influence and put a big crimp in their bottom lines. Advertisers are now jumping ship like passengers from the Titanic because readership is running like lemmings to the sea of cable television channels, web sites, blogs and podcasts. Our attention spans are miniscule and the daily on the doorstep is at least 18 hours behind the breaking news that we get via alerts on our desktops and our mobiles. Nobody wants the product that only a daily can deliver any more, right?
Actually, yes and no. Nicholas Negroponte, Chairman Emeritus of the MIT Media Lab, in his groundbreaking book, Being Digital, wrote in 1995 that there would be no need to cut down trees to produce paper, using all the water and energy resources needed to deliver tons of actual product when we can deliver a few megabytes of data at the speed of light at virtually no cost. What Negroponte didn’t fully anticipate when he was predicting the future was just how much information would be transmitted and how it would be sorted, searched, re-packaged, and regurgitated.
Further, he was thinking meta thoughts in the ideal and he didn’t predict in a practical manner that e-bay, Craigslist, Amazon and hundreds of other sellers, large and small, would use the internet to appeal directly to buyers and therefore greatly reduce the newspapers’ ability to sell advertising. And that’s the crux of the issue – without advertising dollars to pay the freight, there’s no way in today’s model to pay for the cost of the news. But the newspapers themselves should have seen it coming (like the Big Three), when their bread and butter classified car ads, apartment listings and personals started showing up online – free of charge.
A recent wag said newspapers can’t survive because who would pay for something they can get free. Actually, everyone’s been asking that question. First of all, everyone seems to be forgetting the cable television model and premium services like HBO and Showtime and pay-per-view wrestling and concerts when they ask that question. Or Sirius and XM radio. I mean, who would have imagined that we’d pay for radio and television shows when they’d always been broadcast free of charge? (And by the way, I still get furious when I think about how we got duped into paying for a drink of water.)
And beside, what do the newspapers have to offer that people would be willing to pay for? The answer to that can be summarized in a single word: News.
Newspapers will have to become news organizations to survive. Marketers and advertisers of substance will pay to ride along with the kind of in-depth news and smart reporting that is unavailable on CNN or, of late, even the Wall Street Journal. People pay for newspaper subscriptions; they’ll pay for the news online. The New York Times and the Atlanta Journal Constitution will have to buy a craigslist or develop their own online classifieds, or partner with Google and Yahoo, to pay for their news bureaus – and brand advertisers will pay the dollars to be seen by thought leaders and thoughtful readers who insist that their investigative reporters get more time and space than they get on tv or Twitter.
After all, we’re paying a premium for movies on demand that will soon be available on HBO, which we pay a fee for even though if we wait another three months they’ll be available free of charge on basic cable. Oh yeah, subscribers pay for that too. Newspapers should fully embrace the future and transform into news organizations and news delivery systems because, as Thomas Jefferson said in 1787, “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” He was really talking about the dissemination of knowledge and not the format.
We need the news. It’s the paper that’s dead.
Steve Brett
58 Advertising
Copyright 2009
Read more about Walter Isaacson’s new media model in his Time Magazine article.
Read about the New York Time’s take on its own situation in the New York Times.